The first one went up on the Chain Bridge.
Oriel saw it go up. She was standing at the north end of the bridge in a borrowed carter’s coat with the hood up and her stick, at the seventh bell, in the cold grey light, with the river smoking below and the first market-carts coming over from the south bank. And the eel-man — a short, square, bald man called Mott Grebe who’d sold eels from a barrow at the north end of the Chain Bridge for thirty years and took a crown a bundle and asked nothing — took a sheet from under the wet sacking on his barrow, and a pot of flour-paste and a brush, and pasted it to the stone pier of the bridge beside him, at head height, where everyone coming off the bridge would walk straight into it.
He stood back and looked at it.
He read it. He moved his lips. She watched him read the whole of the front, slowly, and then go round the side of the pier to see if there was more, and come back, and stand with his paste-brush dripping.
“Huh,” said Mott Grebe.
He put another one up on the other side of the pier.
By the eighth bell there were five thousand and forty of them, and they were everywhere.
On the piers of the Chain Bridge and the Old Bridge and the Weir Bridge. On the doors of the corn-exchange. On the walls of the fish-market and the Ropewalk and the cattle-pens at the east gate. On the church doors — the ropemakers had done the church doors, all eleven of them on the north bank, at dawn, with handcarts, before the sextons were up. On the windows of every tavern in the river quarter. On the wall of the Low Lantern on Cistern Street, where Sarn had put one up herself, at the sixth bell, and then stood looking at it for a long moment before she walked away. On the lamp-posts in Aske Square, all the way round, a ring of them, black and red, facing the shuttered doors of the Ledger House of Aske. On the gate-pillars of the Wells.
On the railings of the Survey House forecourt. All the way along. Every bay.
Orrel’s clerks had done the Survey House. Twelve of them, junior surveyors and copy-clerks, who’d come to Orrel’s house in the dark at the fifth bell because he’d asked them to, and been handed a bundle each and a paste-pot, and gone up the hill in pairs. One of them had pasted a sheet to the base of the great iron lamp-basket at the foot of the Survey House steps, right on the brass line of the Meridian, where it ran out across the forecourt, so that anyone coming to renew their deed would have to step over the line and past the map to reach the doors.
At the eighth bell, the great north doors of the Survey House opened, the way they did every Settlement Day, and two clerks carried out the long table and set it on the top step, and the Register clerks sat down behind it with their pens and their seals and their great red books, and the line of deed-holders waiting in the forecourt — three hundred of them, four hundred, it was always a crowd, people came from all over the Orme Leaf for it — began to move forward.
And stopped.
Because the man at the front of the line, a stout farmer from the Westerlies in his good coat with his deed in a tin case under his arm, had stopped at the foot of the steps. Beside the lamp-basket. In front of the map.
He was reading it.
Oriel stood at the back of the forecourt, by the gate, among the hawkers and the crowd, with her hood up, and watched four hundred people read the map.
Not all at once. One by one. The line had stopped, so people stepped out of it to see why, and saw the sheet on the lamp-basket, and then saw the others — on the railings, all along — and went to read those. They gathered at the railings in little knots. They read the front. They went round and read the back. They called to each other. Have you seen — What’s this — Look, here’s Lusk, there’s two of Lusk —
And they laughed.
That was the first thing. She’d known it would be. She’d told herself it would be, all night at the press. But it was still hard to hear. A big comfortable laugh rolling round the forecourt from knot to knot. Two of Orme! Two leagues east! Where are we, then, in a field? A man in a merchant’s coat reading the Lip lines aloud in a mocking voice, C.423, the eastern quarter of Orme, and pointing east across the forecourt at the copper roofs of the eastern quarter, perfectly solid, perfectly still, smoke going up from their chimneys. Laughter. A woman calling it a prank by the students. A man saying it was the Cantons, it was Canton propaganda, trying to frighten people west. Somebody else saying it was the Wells, the Wells were mad, everybody knew the Listeners went mad. Look, look at the back, “a hundred and twelve Listeners”, that proves it —
Laughter.
And then the doors at the top of the steps opened again, and Deputy Calloway came out.
He came out fast, in his black coat, red-faced, with three Chainguard behind him, and he stood at the top of the steps behind the Register clerks’ long table and looked out at the forecourt full of people standing at the railings reading black-and-red maps instead of standing in line to renew their deeds, and for a moment his face went perfectly blank.
Then he raised his voice.
“Citizens!” It carried. He had a big voice. “This — this sheet — is a forgery. A criminal forgery. Printed by a fugitive from the Crown Survey, one Oriel Tash, wanted for sedition and theft. It is a lie from beginning to end. The Register is settled. The Register is always settled. Where the Register says a thing is, there it is in law!” He gestured at the Chainguard. “Tear them down. All of them. Anyone found posting or keeping one will be taken up.” He turned back to the crowd. “The deeds. Please. The line. Let us proceed.”
The Chainguard went down the steps and began to tear the maps off the railings.
The crowd watched them do it.
And something changed. Oriel felt it. She’d felt the ground change once, in Hob Strand’s field — a pressure, a lean, before anything moved. This was like that. The laughter stopped. Not all at once. In patches. People who’d been laughing a moment ago stood with their hands at their sides and watched a Chainguard in grey rip a map off the railings in front of them and crumple it and throw it on the flags.
The stout farmer from the Westerlies, at the front of the line, still beside the lamp-basket, looked at the map on the lamp-basket in front of him.
He looked at the Chainguard coming toward it.
He took it down himself. Carefully. Peeling it off the iron with his thick fingers before the Chainguard got there. He folded it. He put it in the tin case with his deed.
He didn’t say anything. He just did it.
Then, behind him, a woman in a blue shawl took one off the railings, quickly, and folded it, and put it in her basket.
Then a clerk.
Then a lot of people.
By the time the Chainguard had gone the length of the railings there was nothing left on them to tear. Four hundred people stood in the forecourt of the Survey House with folded maps in their pockets and their baskets and their deed-cases. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t laugh. They just stood there, and looked up at Deputy Calloway at the top of the steps.
Calloway looked back at them.
“The line,” he said again. Less loudly. “Please.”
The line moved forward. Slowly. People went up the steps one by one and renewed their deeds, the way they had every Settlement Day of their lives, and signed the red books, and had the seals pressed. And came back down. With the map still in their pocket.
The first chain came out at noon, in Weaver’s Yard.
Oriel didn’t see it. Sarn told her. Sarn had been sitting on the step of a pump in Weaver’s Yard, a cobbled square in the cloth quarter with a little grey church on one side with a brass Survey star in its tower parapet, and she’d heard it before she saw it: a chain being paid out on cobbles. Like your chain-man. Link, link, link. I’d know it anywhere now.
It was a widow called Edda Marsh, who’d been married forty years to a land-agent who’d died in the spring, and had his old chain in a bag in her front room, proved at Orme every year and stamped at every tenth, that she’d never known what to do with. She’d read the map on the church door at the eighth bell. She’d gone home and got the chain. She’d got the deed to her own house — three doors down from the church, a narrow brick house with a blue door — out of the tin box under her bed. And she’d come back to the church and hooked the end of her husband’s chain over the brass star in the tower, with the sexton holding his ladder and shouting at her, and paid it out across Weaver’s Yard toward her own front door, link by link, the way she’d watched her husband do it a thousand times.
Half the yard came out to watch.
She read the last link against her doorstep. She read it again. Then she went back and did it a second time.
“Nine rods,” Sarn told Oriel that night, in Tolley’s cellar, with her eyes closed, as if she were hearing it again. “She stood on her own doorstep and said it out loud. Nine rods. Her deed says her door’s twenty-two chains and four links from the church star, and it’s twenty-two chains and four links and nine rods. She’s walked it twice. Her door’s not where the Register says. And then somebody in the crowd said, Well, the church has moved, then, you daft woman, and she said, Yes. That’s what the map says. The church has moved. Everything’s moved.” Sarn opened her eyes. “And then somebody else said, Lend us the chain.”
After Weaver’s Yard, it was everywhere.
Oriel walked through the city all afternoon with her hood up and her stick, and Bastian beside her in a carter’s coat with his splinted hand in his pocket, and everywhere they went someone was walking a chain.
Not many. Not at first. A dozen. Two dozen. But everywhere. A cooper in Barrel Lane, with a chain he’d borrowed from the builder next door, walking from the star on the bridge-pier to the corner of his yard. Two old men in the Westerly Market, arguing over a chain between them, one at each end, from the market-cross star. A woman in an apron on her hands and knees at the Old Bridge reading links against a doorstep while her neighbors held lanterns. A young clerk from the corn-exchange, one of Orrel’s twelve, Oriel thought, walking a chain down Corn Street with a crowd behind him, reading out the links as he went, loud, like a crier. Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two.
And every one of them, when they got to the end, stood very still for a moment.
Then went back, and did it again.
In Butter Lane they passed a knot of people round a gatepost with a brass star on it, and a big red-faced man with a chain over his shoulder was shouting. It’s wrong. Your chain’s wrong. The chain’s short. And the woman holding the other end said, It’s a proved chain, it’s stamped, look, and he said, Then the Register’s — and stopped. And stood there. With his mouth open.
Bastian stopped.
Oriel felt him stop beside her. She looked up. He was looking at the woman with the chain. She was having trouble. It was a long line, down a crooked lane, round a corner, and she was trying to keep the chain taut with one hand and plant arrows with the other and read the links, and her chain kept sagging at the corner, and every time it sagged the reading changed, and the crowd round her was jeering.
Bastian walked over to her.
He didn’t say anything. He just held out his good hand. She looked at him — at the size of him, at his bruised face, at his splinted hand — and after a moment she gave him the end of the chain.
He walked it.
One-handed. Down Butter Lane, round the crooked corner, slow and heavy and straight, never letting it sag, never letting it kink, stopping every tenth link and waiting while she planted the arrow. The jeering stopped. People stood back to let him through. He walked it all the way to her front door and pulled it taut and read the last link against her step with his thumb, the way he’d read the corner-stone of the boneyard wall at Lusk.
“Fourteen chains, nine links,” he said. “And six rods.”
The woman looked at her deed.
“It says fourteen and nine,” she said. Very quietly.
“It does,” said Bastian.
“So it’s six rods out.”
“Six rods.”
“How do you know your walking’s right?” shouted the red-faced man. “How do you know you didn’t walk it long?”
Bastian turned round and looked at him.
“Chain doesn’t lie,” he said. In his slow quarry voice. Not loud. It carried anyway. Everybody in Butter Lane heard it. “People hold it.”
He held out the chain-end to the red-faced man.
“You hold it,” said Bastian. “Walk it back.”
The red-faced man stood there for a long moment with the whole lane looking at him.
Then he took the chain.
At dusk Oriel went to Orrel’s.
Not to his house. To the Survey House. To his office on the second floor, north side, with the tall window over the copper roofs. He’d told her to. Come at the lamp-lighting, he’d said, three nights ago, in the cellar, with his clerks waiting outside for their bundles. By the east wing. The servers’ door. Nobody looks at a servers’ door on Settlement Day, the kitchens are mad. Come up the back stair. I’ll be there.
He was there.
He was standing at his window in his shirtsleeves with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, looking out over the city in the dusk. He turned round when she came in. He looked very tired, and very old, and different. She couldn’t say how.
“Twelve of them,” he said. “My clerks. Every one came. Every one went up the hill in the dark with a paste-pot.” He shook his head slowly. “Twenty years I’ve been telling them to close the book.”
She took the map out of her coat. The one from the top of the last stack, folded in four, faintly creased.
He took it. He unfolded it on his desk. On the green leather, where her Lusk report had lain a month ago, weighted with the stapler and the inkpot. He looked at it for a long time. At Lusk, twice. At the thread between.
Then he went to the wall. To the forty-one volumes of the Register of the Eastern Pale in their red calf. He took down the framed print of the Survey Charter that hung above them — Article One: Where the Register says a thing is, there it is in law — and set it on the floor, face to the wall.
And he pinned the map up in its place.
Black and red. The Orme Leaf, as it was. Above the Register. Where anyone who came into the office would see both.
He stood back and looked at it.
“There,” said Dunstan Orrel.
Out of the tall window, over the copper roofs, the lamps were coming on across Orme. And among the lamps, on roof after roof — Oriel saw them as she turned to go — small lights, low, moving. Lanterns. On roofs. Dozens. People on their roofs with lanterns, in the cold, in the dusk, setting up something on stands. Spyglasses. Telescopes. A ship’s glass on a tripod on the flat roof of a chandlery by the river. An old brass glass on a kitchen chair on a slate roof in the cloth quarter. A clockmaker on the leads of his shop on Corn Street with three clocks lined up on the parapet beside him, waiting for the first star.
CHECK IT YOURSELF.
“They’re looking,” said Orrel, at her shoulder. Very quietly.
“Some of them,” said Oriel.
“Some of them,” he agreed. “Some of them is more than there was this morning.”
They went back to the Ropewalk by Aske Square, because it was the shortest way and because Oriel wanted to see.
The Ledger House of Aske stood on the north side of the square, a great pale stone front of columns and steps and tall bronze doors with the Aske mark on them — a set of scales over a key. It was always lit at night. Lamps in every window, to show it never slept. Tonight it was lit too.
But the bronze doors were shut. And there were people on the steps.
Not many. Forty, fifty. Standing in the cold under the ring of lamp-posts round the square where the maps had been — the Chainguard had torn them down, the lamp-posts were bare, you could see the flour-paste glistening on the iron. Standing quietly. Men in good coats with deed-cases. A woman Oriel recognized from the forecourt that morning, in the blue shawl. A shopkeeper. A farmer. Waiting. Looking at the shut bronze doors.
“What are they doing?” said Bastian.
“Waiting for it to open,” said Oriel. “In the morning. They want to be first.”
“First for what?”
“Their money,” said Oriel.
She stood at the corner of the square in her carter’s coat and her hood and watched the fifty people on the steps of the Ledger House of Aske, and she thought about Penhallow, in his dome, under his round window, saying the Ledger House calls in its loans to cover itself, and everybody owes more than they can pay, all at once. She’d heard him say it. She’d known it was true. She’d done it anyway.
She’d thought she’d done the sum.
She looked at the fifty people in the cold. One of them was an old man in a threadbare coat who’d brought a folding stool and was sitting on it at the very front, against the bronze doors, with a blanket round his knees, as if he meant to stay all night.
“Tash,” said Bastian, quietly.
“I know.”
“That’s going to be four hundred by the morning.”
“I know.”
They stood there a while longer. Then Bastian put his good hand on her shoulder and turned her, gently, and they walked on toward the Ropewalk, and behind them in the dark the people on the steps of the Ledger House stood and waited, and the lamps burned in every window, and nobody came to the door.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
SETTLEMENT DAY, 1st Eleventhmonth C.412
MAPS UP BY 8th BELL: ALL 5,040 (EST.)
SURVEY FORECOURT: CALLOWAY ORDERED THEM TORN DOWN. THE CROWD TOOK THEM FIRST.
FIRST CHAIN: E. MARSH, WEAVER’S YARD. 9 RODS.
BUTTER LANE: 6 RODS (B.C. WALKED IT).
ROOFS AT DUSK: GLASSES. DOZENS.
D. ORREL: CHARTER FACE TO THE WALL. MAP UP.
ASKE SQUARE, NIGHT: ~50 ON THE STEPS. WAITING.
I DID NOT DO THIS SUM.